MOBILE APP PUTS NEW TWIST ON FINDING EVENTS

Jan Anton thinks his company has created a better mousetrap with Time to Enjoy, a mobile app that allows users to search for things to do based on their location and the time of day that they want to go out.

The struggle for Anton — as well as thousands of other app developers — is making the app stand out from the crowd and become the next Angry Birds.

It’s not easy. There are thousands of apps competing for attention in Apple’s App Store and the Android Marketplace. Very few become runaway hits.

Smartphone users worldwide will download about 36 billion apps in 2012, according to industry research firm ABI Research. That’s almost 37 apps for the average smartphone user, up from 35 apps downloaded per smartphone on average in 2011.

Since it launched in April, Time to Enjoy has about 9,000 downloads. But Anton believes the app has the potential to go viral by giving users a more precise way to discover things to do.

Time to Enjoy, which is available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, pulls in data from San Diego’s Eventful and Tribune Media Services about movies, concerts, art exhibits, children’s activities and other events. It allows users to search based on the time they want to go out.

“It’s 4 p.m. on a Saturday and you’re at the beach in La Jolla with your friends,” said Anton. “Somebody says, ‘Let’s do something later on.’ One of your friends has the Time to Enjoy app. He opens it and taps on 6 p.m. on the calendar. He gets results from an eight-mile radius around La Jolla.”

Anton said he did that exact search this week.

“We returned 84 results in La Jolla, from art galleries to live theater to kids and family stuff to movies to music concerts.”

Users can set the app to work from a distance as small as few hundred feet to a radius of 50 miles. The app links to about 5 million movie show times throughout the United States, and more than 1 million other events each month. It integrates with the smartphone calendar.

The company hopes to release a version for smartphones running Google’s Android operating system later this year.

For now, the company is emphasizing getting more users to download the free app. Over time, Anton expects it to make money through special offers — perhaps working with outfits like Groupon. Knowing where a smartphone user is going to be at a specific time is considered a powerful tool for targeting coupons.

The company has plenty of competition from apps such as AroundMe. Anton said the company plans campaigns to break through the noise, including a marketing effort on college campuses.

“It takes time; we know that,” he said. “The challenge for us is getting to 100,000 downloads. When that happens, going from 100,000 to 1 million will actually be easier.”